🔒 Reactionary Scientists Whine About Woke

While researching for mah book that I’m writing, I came across a preorder listing for another book that seems right up my alley. That’s a dangerous thing to happen when I’m in the midst of a book buying spree. It’s called The War on Science, and it’s subtitled: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process. 

 At a time when the Trump administration and evangelical theocrats on one side, and neoreactionary tech social engineers on the other, are together launching the biggest and broadest assault on scientific inquiry since the Enlightenment, and that’s exactly the type of thing I write about, I’d already heard enough. I was ready to hit that preorder button. 

But I hadn’t heard enough. Thankfully before it was too late to halt my purchase finger screaming toward the mouse button my eyes drifted further downward to alight upon the fact that this book is edited by science’s biggest asshole. 

Immediately I know everything I need to know about this book without even needing to crack it open. Seriously, that’s all I need—the title, the subtitle, the name of the editor. I’ve basically read this book now. 

I’m fairly confident that there isn’t going to be a single word about the right’s catastrophic assault on science in this book. Or, okay, 70% confident. I decide I should go to the book’s website for some more information before I write it off completely, and oh god have mercy, would you look at that. 

 Question: Why would you bother paying 39 scientists when you could just pay Jesse Singal once to write 39 essays?

My assurance is locked. This is going to be a book about getting the woke out of science. At a time when the President of the United States is trying to shut down entire universities if they study transgenic mice because he’s uncomfortable with how much that word sounds like transgender, at a time when the top three medical authorities are cranks and conspiracy theorists who think the jury is out on germ theory, when actual scientists with spines are protesting for their very livelihoods in the face of massive layoffs, cuts, and ideological demands, these assholes are having a big old whine about the STEM equivalent of ethics in fucking games journalism. 

I could write at length about the smug irony of this, about the fact that the only reason 39 cancelled assholes are bold enough to put this book together is because their guy won and he’s bulldozing the institutions and even though most of their non-famous scientific colleagues are going to lose their careers as collateral damage against the anti-woke wrecking ball, they know that their own careers will benefit massively. Because Cancelled isn’t really cancelled. Cancelled is the opposite of cancelled. They’re literally doing the Barry Deutsch cartoon:

I’d only heard of, like, 60% of the people on this list of contributors but that was enough for me to very confidently guess what’s entirely up with the other 40%. So I decided I’ll make this as much a mission of discovery for myself as it might be for you, as I research each and every one of these people, identify their grievances, and compile a kind of predictive review of what I expect this book to be like.

 While I was researching I began to notice how many of the people on this list are associated with something called Heterodox Academy, as well as the right wing think tank, American Enterprise Institute, which I suspect, but cannot verify, might have funded this book. 

Strap into your seats, friends. “39 scientists and scholars.” I’m about to review…

Dorian Abbot 

 Dr. Abbott is a Trump-supporting geophysics professor at the University of Chicago who was Cancelled in 2020 for writing a Newsweek op-ed about the encroachment of DEI into American academia, in which he casually compares modern DEI practices to the social conditions that led to Nazi Germany, because it “entails treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals.”

 MIT wound up cancelling a speech that he’d been booked to present due to student backlash. Look, I understand that public communication can actually be kind of a minefield and sometimes you legitimately don’t expect to step on a particular mine, but there’s a pretty rule of thumb in general that you shouldn’t invoke The Holocaust for issues that are way less serious than The Holocaust.

 For Abbot, this one cancelled speech is his entire life now. This is it. He didn’t get to do the “John Carlson Lecture” at MIT in 2020 just because of this one little white genocide thing that he said, and now this has become his career, because—again—being Cancelled is more lucrative than being a scientist. When this gravy train pulls into the station you have to get on board.

 He has a Substack (a lot of these people do) and he talks about how to reform the university from within. It involves mandating “viewpoint diversity” which, to me, just feels like such an idiotic demand for the sciences. Science is already “viewpoint diverse” or else it wouldn’t work, but the goal of science isn’t permanent disagreement. This shouldn’t be difficult to understand. People who complain about a lack of “viewpoint diversity” in, for example, climate science, are nearly 100% of the time just complaining that not enough climate scientists think that climate change isn’t real.

 He also recommends that universities “appoint a vocal Trump supporter as the director of the Institute of Politics.” Because, holy shit, yes, Donald Trump, famous supporter of viewpoint diversity. Sorry Dorian, big time loser I’ve typed way too many words about, now moving on.

John Armstrong 

 I don’t actually know which John Armstrong this refers to because there’s a bunch of them and, contextually, I don’t think it would be the Scottish-Australian philosopher who collaborated with Alain De Botton on Art as Therapy.

 I think it’s more likely to be this ludicrous person from King’s College London who thinks feral indigenous tribespeople are trying to ooga-booga their way into western mathematics and force physicists to factor the Māori Sun God Tama-nui-te-rā into their equations.

It’s kind of funny to watch the number of times the host of this interview tries turns the dial toward some hard-R racism and Armstrong seems to know just well enough to put the brakes on it.

 His Twitter feed is just an absolutely endless assault on transgender people, which, just a heads up, is going to be a running theme here.

 Peter Boghossian 

 Oddly enough the fact that Peter Boghossian closely associates with white supremacists isn’t what most people know him for and isn’t enough to dismiss his Cancellation complaints out of hand. Ordinarily I could end this just by mentioning that he’s a good friend and regular collaborator with Stefan Molyneaux, an alt-right lunatic so repulsive that he makes James Lindsay look like a normal person, conveniently, because Boghossian collaborates with him as well.

 But Boghossian is allowed leeway because he is a philosopher and philosophers are allowed to hang out with anyone. We bring it on ourselves, really—if Heidegger gets a pass, then we really have to let this one go. Besides, Boghossian says he agrees with Molyneaux’s metaphysics and not his notions about the natural inferiority of nonwhite races. Then again, I dunno, if you legitimately cannot find someone who agrees with you on metaphysics who isn’t also a Nazi then maybe you’re wrong about the metaphysics too?

 Anyway, I digress. Boghossian is best known for thinking the social sciences, or “grievance studies” as he dismissingly calls them, are bullshit, and to prove this he wrote a bunch of nonsense articles to social science journals to see if they would get published, and some of them did! Most of them didn’t, but some of them did!

 Actually it kind of sounds like he’s the one waging war on science here, and also sorta failing?

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